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The laws of the Shogunate are chiefly those inherited from their former Xianese lords, save that magistrates are now appointed by the Shogun, and Xianese daifu have no privileges- not that many daifu are fool enough to linger in Kitaminato under its new management.

The chief distinction in the Shogunate is now between the "commoner" and "samurai" classes. All Accursed are automatically accounted of the samurai class, as well as all members of the six great daimyo houses. All others are counted commoners, whatever their rank. Commoners are obligated to obey all laws of the city and obey all commands of any member of a great house, Accursed or otherwise. Samurai are held to absolutely no law whatsoever. Some will speak poetically of the obligations of a liegeman to his lord and of the prescriptions of classical Kueh bushido, but these lofty and noble concepts are far too rarified to be subject to the coarse understandings of a magistrate, and so whatever a samurai does is, by definition, a noble and laudable act.

As a natural consequence, most of the humans in the Shogunate dread Accursed and members of the great houses. They will go out of their way to avoid such persons if offense can be avoided, and will take care not to anger them. In the unlikely case that a commoner kills a samurai, however, there is no formal penalty. If that samurai was a member of a great house, then the murderers can expect a horrible revenge, but a clanless Accursed who is brought down by a pack of desperate peasant warriors might well pass with no more than a shrug of indifference from a town's lords. Samurai are expected to be able to tend to their own purposes, and one so weak as to die at the hands of commoners was clearly not much of a samurai to begin with.

Strangers in the Shogunate are invariably considered commoners, unless they too are Accursed. While it is possible for a strange Accursed to gain great advantage by abusing the locals and robbing them of their goods, the hatred of the Accursed in certain quarters welcomes the opportunity to murder one of the devil-men without having to fear the butchery of a village in retaliation- to say nothing of the offense that local samurai might take at some stranger interfering with their human cattle.